3049 days ago
I was sitting on the train the other day and on the other side of the carriage a couple of seats away and facing me was a rather foxy woman of perhaps 45 years. She sat next to a lad who was perhaps 25 and looked sufficiently like the woman that I am confident that he was her son, rather than her young lover. They spoke in French and she was reading a booklet in English with a title something like "50 ways to look better naked". I could see enough to notice that it contained pictures although I am too short sighted to see what the pictures were.
3769 days ago
Hitherto I have showered at the Greek Hovel – that is to say stood under a hosepipe perched on my vine trellis – wearing my increasingly loose red swimming trunks. It was I suppose an effort to preserve modesty.
But as I stripped off today following my run and about an hour of manual labour it struck me that my shower is more or less obscured by trees at the edge of the garden and by the olive groves. The nearest house (the monastery) is at least a mile and a half away and so unless the one monk there is sitting with binoculars that can see through trees I can do or wear what I want.
I do not think that I will be going in for public displays of nudity on the sort of beaches where that happens. Apart from anything else, having sat naked on the snake veranda trying to get a bit of a tan, I am still conscious that my tummy is rather too large for me to want to show it to anyone else and that by bum is also a bit too big.
But given the drawbacks of living in the middle of nowhere, one advantage is not having to worry about what you wear or indeed if you are wearing anything at all.
